Back in early April, Josh Marshall asked, “Now that Hillary’s fired Mark Penn, can she now fire Lanny Davis? Please? Or ask that he be put under some sort of house arrest?”
It’s not an uncommon sentiment, though the Clinton campaign can’t fire Davis; he’s not actually on staff. He’s just a very vocal campaign advocate, and prominent Clinton fundraiser, with extensive enough media contacts to generate attention for his political arguments. In 2006, Davis’ task was defending Joe Lieberman. In 2007, his task was giving the Bush gang bi-partisan cover by serving on the hollow White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. And in 2008, his task is criticizing Barack Obama. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The problem with Lanny Davis, though, is that he’s just been so unpleasant and hard to take seriously. This week, for example, Davis is offering a proposal to resolve the disagreement over how to deal with DNC delegates from Florida and Michigan.
In Michigan, Clinton received 55 percent of the vote. According to Thegreenpapers.com, she thus should receive 73 pledged delegates based on that percentage. What about the 50 remaining uncommitted delegates, and 7 collectively cast for Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who were also on the ballot?
Some of those 50 delegates might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama.
One little known fact: Clinton complied with party rules by allowing her name to remain on the ballot, as did Dodd and Kucinich. Obama was not forced by party rules to remove his name — he chose to do so.
The Rules Committee has several options. The fairest would be to allocate those 57 pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).
Davis’ reputation has taken a few hits of late, but I’m afraid a proposal like this one isn’t going to bolster his credibility. His “compromise” offer doesn’t make a lot of sense.
First, Davis awards seven delegates based on the collective vote Dodd and Kucinich earned. It’s not at all clear how Davis arrived at this number — neither Dodd nor Kucinich passed the 15% threshold in any Michigan district.
Second, Davis probably should have used a calculator before writing a piece for publication. As fivethirtyeight explained, “Davis’s arithmetic is wrong. He suggests that Michigan had 130 delegates: 73 for Clinton, 50 uncommitted, and these 7 phantom delegates he assigns to Kucinich and Dodd. But in fact, Michigan had been assigned 128 pledged delegates before its sanctions, and not 130.”
Third, Davis takes a quick and extraneous shot at Obama for removing his name from the ballot. Obama, like John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden, read party rules to necessitate removing their names from consideration. Clinton, at the time, came to a different conclusion, but insisted that the results from Michigan would not count. To borrow Davis’ construct, Clinton was not forced by party rules to publicly declare that the results of Michigan’s primary would not count — she chose to do so.
And fourth, best of all, Davis offers a compromise solution that he feels is “more generous to Obama than to Clinton.” As part of his approach, Clinton would get all of the 73 delegates she would have won if Michigan’s primary counted. He’d then divide the remaining 57 in half, giving 28 to Clinton and 27 to Obama. (Of course, 28 + 27 = 55, so I assume Davis meant 29 and 28.)
In other words, as Davis sees it, Clinton won a primary in which she was the only top-tier candidate on the ballot. He’d give her all of the delegates she “won.” As for the Michigan Dems who didn’t vote for Clinton, Davis would direct more than half of that support to Clinton anyway. She’s entitled to the delegates she earned, and most of the delegates she didn’t.
As for Florida, Davis recommends honoring the results, just as they are.
This is what constitutes a “compromise.”
Wow.